Angela Merkel’s Tortuous Path Toward a German Coalition

BERLIN — Germans normally wait about six weeks after an election for a government to be sworn in. That benchmark quietly came and went a week ago, an indication of the challenge facing a politically weakened Angela Merkel.

Since her party won just 30.2 percent of the vote in the Sept. 24 election, the chancellor has found herself struggling to bridge a yawning gap between prospective coalition partners, rendering a normally painstaking process even more protracted and difficult.

The four parties in the talks — her conservative Christian Democrats; their Bavaria-only sister party, the Christian Social Union; the pro-business Free Democrats and the environmentalist Greens — span the political spectrum.

This week the chancellor set a deadline of next Thursday for the parties to decide whether they can make a government work — and these are just the preliminary talks. Should the parties decide to move to the next step, only then will they start hammering out what could be the longest, most detailed coalition agreement Germany has seen to date.

One analyst, Uwe Jun, a professor of political science at the University of Trier, gave the four-way coalition talks a 2-to-1 chance of success. That’s better than the odds given by some involved in the negotiations. Such a coalition is untried at the federal level and only recently attempted in two of the country’s less populous states.

The chancellor’s governing partner of the past four years, the center-left Social Democrats, have vowed to remain in the opposition. So if Ms. Merkel’s search for new partners fails, Germans would be forced to hold another election.

The negotiations for a new coalition have already proved intense and have frequently broken down into sniping. The Free Democrats’ leader, Christian Lindner, went so far as to bluntly declare that his party had “no fear of new elections” should the current efforts fail.

That threat earned him a rebuke from the chancellor, who has otherwise been mostly silent on the progress of the talks.

Ms. Merkel has no interest in another election. Her party lost 55 seats in the September vote, mostly to the Free Democrats but also to the far-right Alternative for Germany, known by its German initials AfD. Although recent polls show German sentiment largely unchanged since the election, a fresh round of voting would surely spell the end of Ms. Merkel’s 12-year tenure.

The uncertainty of another election could also open the way for a further strengthening of the AfD, which last month made its debut in Parliament as the third-strongest bloc. It has 94 seats in the 709-seat legislature.

“All actors have a strong interest in seeing this succeed,” Mr. Jun said. Despite the strong individual interests of each party, they hold “enough shared interests and points of overlap” for cooperation, he said.

So far, the gulf has appeared widest between the Free Democrats and the Greens. But the political will to see a government come together was evident in a series of breakthroughs in negotiations on Tuesday.

The Greens agreed to drop demands for setting fixed dates for a ban on vehicles with internal combustion engines and for the shuttering of coal-fired power plants. For their part, the Free Democrats offered to accept more modest income tax cuts than those pledged in their campaign.

Other big sticking points in the talks remain, among them whether to limit the number of migrants who can enter the country to apply for asylum.

Even if party negotiators can bridge the gaps, there may be a long road still ahead.

Four years ago, after a coalition agreement was reached, the Social Democrats chose to have its members vote on the accord. That left Germany with a lame-duck government for about three months.

This time around, the Greens are taking a similar path, having their party congress decide on a preliminary accord — an extraordinary step.

“Now is the time for bridge-building,” Karin Göring-Eckhardt, the parliamentary whip for the Greens said on Tuesday. “We only have practically nine days left to negotiate until our deadline. And then we will see whether this house can be built.”

The drawn-out talks have inspired creative minds on social media, with Germans competing to come up with a name for the negotiations based on popular films.

One suggestion was “The Rocky Horror Jamaika Show,” a play on the cult classic and the nickname for the potential coalition, whose members’ political colors (black, yellow and green) resemble the Jamaican flag.